Reebok Instapump Fury Prototype

Mar 15, 2019

The Reebok Instapump Fury hits the quarter-century mark and to mark this feat Reebok treat us all to a reissue of the pioneering silhouette.

The foundations for the Reebok Instapump were laid in the early 90s with the formation of the RAC division, RAC equating to “Reebok Advanced Concepts”. The RAC division were a crack team of up and coming footwear designers from a diverse range of design fields. Step forward Steven Smith a young designer hired to the RAC team after a slew of impressive early work including some work on another industry trailblazer, that we got the chance to collaborate on in 2012… Armed with a background in industrial design and a clean minimalist approach, Smith and his fellow RAC team members set out to revolutionize the sports footwear market.

The early ’90s saw the RAC team develop ‘HEXALITE’ a sole technology based on the strongest structure in nature, the honeycomb. The tech soon went on to become synonymous with Reebok styles of the ’90s. Following the initial success with their latest creation the RAC team moved on to explore how HEXALITE could be harnessed in conjunction with Reebok’s other tech breakthrough, ‘Pump’. Using data gathered from Reebok’s in-house Human Performance team or ‘HPEL’ for short. They found that most of the weight & pressure was exerted on to the heel and forefoot with minimal impact on the arch area. This coupled with the knowledge of the sole unit being the heaviest part of a shoe and a staggering average of 150 components per shoe lead to Smith and the RAC team pursuing ways cutting the weight to gain even better performance.

The ‘Eureka’ moment came from looking at a Pump technology hangtag. ‘Why can’t we make the bladder the shoe rather than stuffing it in a conventional shoe. The benefits from the proposed new style would be tenfold, cutting the number of component parts down meaning a tighter grip on quality eliminating some of the processes that required close to 200 pairs of hands to produce 1 pair of sneakers.

Deemed to radical to launch at the time, Reebok proposed a gradual reveal slowing offering styles that combined Pump, HEXALITE, Midfoot reductions and graphite fibre plates. Styles such as the Instapump Trainer, Sprint & racer paved the way for Smith’s Magnum Opus the Instapump Fury to launch in 1994. Upon launch in 1994 (as part of the Planet Reebok campaign) the shoe as predicted split opinion with some running heads perplexed by the innovation while the popular science magazine heralded it as one 1994’s greatest innovations in science and technology.